Amid Tensions, a New Portrayal of Anne Frank

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Rosa da Silva as Anne Frank in “Anne,” which offers a more complex portrayal than others. The foundation begun by Anne Frank’s father hopes to make it a permanent, traveling show.CreditCreditKurt van der Elst

AMSTERDAM — Over the decades, the story of Anne Frank has been interpreted onstage in varying ways, including a version that some critics describe as too simplistic. Now a new play, simply titled “Anne,” that opened here last week presents a complex portrayal of a teenage girl: sometimes impetuous, spoiled and lonely.

In this multimedia stage production, Anne resents her mother, mocks adults and revels in her emerging sexuality. The new portrait comes nearly 70 years after her death in a German concentration camp, in 1945, and is part of a flurry of efforts by Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss charitable foundation created in 1963 by her father, Otto, to shape her image for the latest generation.

With its copyright on the diaries of Anne Frank approaching expiration in many countries by 2016, the foundation commissioned what it hopes will be a permanent production that can travel to other countries. It opened on Thursday in a lavish new theater by Amsterdam’s old timber port, drawing King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and a black-tie crowd of 1,000, which rose to its feet in applause at the end.

But Anne’s story has rarely been told without controversy, and this play is no exception. The Swiss foundation, based in Basel, is locked in a fierce rivalry with the Anne Frank House organization, which operates a museum at the secret annex here where Anne hid with her Jewish family before being discovered by the Nazis. The two entities are clashing over archival material, the role of the charity and the preservation of Anne’s legacy.

“Who owns Anne Frank?” said David Barnouw, a Dutch historian and author who has written extensively about what he calls the enduring “Anne Frank phenomenon.” “In Basel they say, ’We are the real owner,’ ” and the play and other commercial activities “are about maintaining the power and the legacy of Anne Frank.”

Before the play opened, the museum’s director, Ronald Leopold, publicly scoffed that “Anne Frank should not be a nice evening out” and frowned on the commercial setting, with tickets selling for up to 75 euros (about $100) and its comfortable amenities — “a glass of wine, a box of snacks, dinner with a nice view.”

The museum acknowledged some positive aspects after the play opened, noting that it gave “more justice to the history of Anne Frank” because it ends with her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, unlike the original 1955 play about her, in which she declares that “people are really good at heart.” Still, they complained that the new play has edited out three friends who played a vital role in protecting the eight inhabitants of the secret annex, and who are the subject of a current exhibition at the museum.

The foundation, which won a legal struggle last summer to force the museum to return thousands of historical documents and letters on loan, defended its approach.

“We have a problem,” said Yves Kugelmann, a foundation board member. “We have archives and we are the universal heir. And we represent a book, which is very famous. So we can sit on it and do nothing. Or we fulfill Otto Frank’s wish to tell the story and use the income for charity.”

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Rosa da Silva is playing Anne Frank in the new play “Anne,” in Amsterdam.CreditKurt van der Elst

The foundation, headed by Anne Frank’s first cousin, Buddy Elias, 89, has other projects in the works: an animated cartoon, a German film, a docudrama and the 2016 opening of the Anne Frank Family Center in the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.

The play is based on the complete diaries of Anne, which were published by her father in 1947 in the Netherlands, with passages about her sexuality excised. The book inspired the 1955 play, written by an American couple, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which was adapted again in 1997 in a Broadway revival with Natalie Portman.

Critics complained that it turned Anne into a pop commodity and underplayed her Jewish identity. One of the sharpest critics was the novelist Cynthia Ozick, who complained that the diaries had been “infantilized, Americanized, homogenized.”

The latest version, written in Dutch by Jessica Durlacher and Leon de Winter, explores the family members’ lives before they hid and Anne’s dream of traveling to Paris. It also tackles the period when they were discovered by German authorities and the aftermath, ending in a surreal scene with Anne’s fading voice and a monologue of her father, Otto, describing the fate of the inhabitants.

The foundation played a key role in shaping the new play by choosing the playwrights and recruiting a producer, Robin de Levita, a Broadway veteran with a hit musical in the Netherlands about a resistance fighter, “Soldier of Orange.” With his company Imagine Nation, Mr. de Levita built the new Theater Amsterdam in eight months. By summer, visitors will have the use of electronic tablets that will provide subtitles or instantaneous translation from the Dutch original in more than seven languages.

Mr. de Levita said his aim was to create “immersive theater,” using enormous 180-degree screens that show newsreels of Hitler spouting hatred against Jews and the elegant script of Anne’s own handwriting in her diary as the actors perform. The sets include one of the secret annex built almost to scale.

The portrayal of Anne, by Rosa da Silva, seems more authentic than previous versions to her cousin, Mr. Elias, an actor whose own bit part as a rabbi in George Clooney’s film “The Monuments Men” ended up being edited out. He survived the war with his family in neutral Switzerland, where he lives today in the same Basel house.

“It was really moving to see Anne as I remember her in her liveliness and her playfulness,” he said. “The actor even looked like my Uncle Otto, a wonderful humanistic man, quiet and reserved. It was an incredible theatrical adventure for me and it really shook me.”

Mr. de Winter and Ms. Durlacher, who are husband and wife, used foundation archives to write the script. “We both write about the shadows of the past because our backgrounds are related to this history,” said Ms. Durlacher, whose grandfather died in Bergen-Belsen and was interned there in the same period as Anne Frank.

Mr. de Winter lost nearly 100 Jewish relatives who were deported to Germany. He grew up, he said, with his mother’s stories of collaborators and betrayal. He noted that just a mile from his home, a swastika, a star of David and the word “Jews” were daubed on a bus stop and a poster for the play. During the debut, the couple’s daughter, Solomonica, 16, started crying at the enormous black-and-white news photos of Jews with stars stitched on their coats.

“I was mostly touched that you saw Anne beyond the icon,” she said. “You saw a simple girl like myself.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Amid Tensions, a New Portrayal of Anne Frank. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe